“Animals, they don’t sort of more shallowly pass away, they just die”. Animals in polish linguistic worldview and contemporary sciences

Abstract

The article compares the linguistic view of animals in present-day Polish with the findings of contemporary science. In the scientific worldview, animals constitute a hierarchically structured and extremely diverse kingdom, with humans belonging to that kingdom phylum Chordata, class Mammalia (subdivision Placentalia), order Primates, family Hominidae. Primatology, zoosemiotics, cognitive etology, and paleoanthropology incessantly supply ever new evidence for links between apes and humans both construct tools, operate by symbolic imagery and self-awareness, communicate, and can even learn an ethnic language. Various animal species, not only apes, are capable of pro-social and rescue-oriented behaviours.

In Polish linguistic worldview, animals (which category roughly covers mammals) are lower than humans in the hierarchy of beings and contrast with humans in that they belong to nature; they are primeval, wild, incapable of thinking; they lack self-awareness; they are driven by instincts rather than by conscience, reason, or will; they only experience lower emotions and biological needs. Semantic connotations of animal names, the derivatives, word-formations, and multi-word units they motivate, as well as the so-called “animal lexicon”, point to the strong axiological aspects in the human-animal opposition animals are associated with that which is bad.